Ms. Greenberg called it her caesura: her daily break in her eight-hour workplace melody—more like a dirge, she sometimes joked. Fancy vocabulary words added syllabic class to any day, she felt, although a steaming cappuccino from the break room’s coffeemaker—a sleek gray machine that looked futuristic in her blocky beige office building—also helped improve her life, in a joltin’ kinda way.

Some coffeemakers (but not that one) now have Bluetooth built in, she thought during her last caesura. Her electric toothbrush had Bluetooth—a Bluetoothbrush, heh. She sipped her cappuccino and thanked Jebus for wordplay, heh heh.

Over dinner at her favorite Greek restaurant, Denton’s girlfriend of six months dumped him because he’d “grown too fucking right-wing,” as she told him in that low, affectless manner he used to find seductive for whatever reason. (They’d met in 2016 on a pro-Trump dating site.) “Have fun with your alt-Reich buddies,” she said, getting up to leave.

So I’m walkin’ down the street yesterday, mindin’ my own business, when I see this hippie kid. He looks real grimy and has dreadlocks down to his butt, and he’s wearin’ one of those ponchos with the Inca designs on them. Have I mentioned it’s the hipster part of town? Lots of hippie panhandlers there. Hipsters and hippies, ha ha. So anyways, he’s sittin’ on the sidewalk cross-legged, and he doesn’t say anything, he’s just holdin’ a sign, a sheet of cardboard from a cardboard box, and the sign says I NEED MONEY FOR BOOZE AND DRUGS. So I tell him, I say “I admire your honesty. Have you gotten much money?” And he says “Gimme some money, and I’ll tell you.” Smart kid. So I give him a dollar, and he says “Thanks. I’ve just sat down here. You’re the first person I’ve met today.” So I laugh and say “Well, I’m honored,” and he laughs, and I walk away lookin’ amused, but inside, I’m actually pissed, ’cause I’ve never liked poppin’ someone’s cherry, so to speak. Too creepy.

At the library today, I browsed through a new release: a memoir from a sixteen-year-old girl who’d had a bicycling accident five years earlier and permanently turned into a quadriplegic. She offers lots of advice about overcoming adversity, though I learned something else from her: never, ever do anything. Anything can ruin your life.

Anyway, the book has a coauthor. Did he work simply for the money, or did he have an emotional investment in her story (no pun intended)? If the latter, did he drink heavily, smoke lots of weed, or do anything else to alleviate his anti-businesslike heart?